Defector
Gideon is snapshots to Andromeda. He is freckled eyelids and never tired—no, never less than full steam fury into all the gaps where her manners used to be—and he is sneering at the emerald glint of her prefect's badge click gasping, hands on her hips to grind her down onto his thigh click blue-faced bellowing in Defense Against the Dark Arts to pull her wand out of her ass and hex back properly. Only Andromeda's not like him; she gets so sapped from pushing all the time; she gets tired. She gets tired.
He is snapshots, a flash of bigot and a glimmer of idol, and he is nothing like poor Ted. Gideon sees things about her that would make Ted's dogma fracture from the edges in, but Andromeda doesn't have a dogma, just a name on a rug in London, and a migraine.
"Drink this," says his sister, Molly, and the tea is scalding and the baby on Molly's hip is crying.
"You didn't have to invite me," Andromeda says, swiping at her watering eyes with the sleeve of her nightshirt with a wince.
"Nonsense. It's Christmas, and if you're like family to Gid, then you're like family to us." And she's not like family to Gideon—at least not the healthy kind you ought to bring home for the holidays—but Molly's telling her the tea will help with her head, and she's fussing over the baby, and she's whipping back out through the door.
The bed sheets in Molly's guest room smell like ghost town and musk, and Andromeda sets the mug on the nightstand and nestles a little into the mattress. Drowsily, Gideon adjusts around her—his arm looping up so his hand drapes over her shoulder, his nose drifting up the bare skin of her sides as the nightshirt rides up and she slides down.
He's atypical; sleep doesn't unlatch his fences. The accusations remain at the rock-set corners of his eyes, and his cheeks are taut and cold.
Maybe he's created something, but she doesn't have to put up with it today.